We're actually moving toward logging our days into a computer, and then when something goes wrong, investigators come in later and go through our personal logs to see what happened in the days leading up to.

We're actually moving toward logging our days into a computer, and then when something goes wrong, investigators come in later and go through our personal logs to see what happened in the days leading up to.

Uhmmm... this is different from a diary, how? Nothing new here, move along. Well, the video & computer elements are new but the concept is the same, no?

The next Big Thing will be when you all get a life and stop pretending that your opinion is important enough to take up space on the internet. Video-bloging is just another "thing" of no importantance. It all makes me sick, I should write an entry in my blog about it.

I really really really want the word "blog" to die very soon. All that it has done is let people express their opinion, and, by capturing 0.000000002% to 0.0000004% of the world's attention (that is 15 to 3000 people), they think they're some sort of vanguard. No, I'm not interested in your "regional bands" [blogspot.com] or the fact that your condo is falling apart [diaryland.com]. I could care less what the "blogosphere" thinks. All this is doing is increasing the signal:noise ratio.

There are people on Wikipedia who remind me of you. Back in the early days (I wasn't there then; I just remember reading some talk pages from that era), there were complaints of the nature, "We have articles about Bart Simpson but not the Amazon Rainforest! Clearly, we need to delete Bart Simpson to show where our priorities are!".

This idea misunderstands the nature of the internet. It's not like a book. There's not a limited amount of space. (Well, there is. But it's not limited enough to matter if you're

I sincerely hope the 'next thing' will include all or some of the following: "getting a life, reading a book, going out with your family, visiting a museum, helping out at your local school, church, mosque etc., calling an old friend on the phone, visitng a park, planting a tree, volunteering for charity work, baking some cakes for the local old folks home etc.".

If even a fraction of the time spent blogging was put to some sensible use the whole community w

I have created a no-nonsense photo blogging service that makes it very easy to turn a pile of digital photos into illustrated blog entries. It takes me hardly any time after a day out with my wife and children to share photos from that day, and from prior days when I procrastinated putting them up. Friends and extended family have been happy to see the cute pictures in a timely manner, and I get to sleep sooner.

Of course, the second issue kind of takes care of the first. Based on the quality of most letter-blogs out there, I suspect that the vast majority of videoblogs could be safely co-hosted from a single Commodore 64 and a 300-baud modem.

Of course, the second issue kind of takes care of the first. Based on the quality of most letter-blogs out there, I suspect that the vast majority of videoblogs could be safely co-hosted from a single Commodore 64 and a 300-baud modem.

That's just a cruel way to treat a Commodore 64 with a 300 baud modem. This equipment had nothing to do with the assclown videoblog crowd.:)

It really makes me wonder. I can see that bw is a serious impediment to using video as text is used now. Lack of bw forces video into serialized information, which is much like accessing your computer's RAM like it was a paper tape unit. {Whirrrrr!} Only the most slovenly Internet sloucher can afford right now to spend the time using a videoblog like a textblog is used.

However, if common bw increases 10-100 fold over what we have now, will actual videoblogs be possible if we can use innovative featur

Hooray for the next big bandwidth waster! Everyone needs to stream not just text describing what I did today, and not just pictures, but full-friggin-motion video showing just what I may have done today!

Seriously, whose life is 1) so exciting that video clips are required for full appreciation and 2) not too exciting to have enough time to record the whole thing on video?

There's a lot of bandwidth to waste!
BitTorrent works like a jet engine in the sense that the more people are interested in something, the more bandwidth there is available to get it. Conversely, you shouldn't worry too much as bad ideas will stay bad ideas and won't propogate much.
BTW, have you seen harddrive prices lately? WTF are *you* putting on your 200 gig drive?

Seriously, whose life is 1) so exciting that video clips are required for full appreciation and 2) not too exciting to have enough time to record the whole thing on video?

Recording isn't the time-killer... Editing is the time-killer.

I started recording the Houston LUG meetings on video a few months back. Initially I used a single camera and panned between the speaker and the projection screen. After the first video it became obvious that one camera constantly pointed at the screen and one camera con

You don't need to film the whole 2 hours of presentation. Just film the speaker and afterwards film 5 minutes of presentation (basically a few seconds per slide). It's not like there is usually animation or something. Alternatively, you can just save slides as images and insert them in the video timeline when you need them.

Most of the presentations at HLUG do not use slides other than an occasional intro and wrap-up. Usually it's a mix of talking and demonstration in a tty or X window. The format of presentations is fairly loose, with members of the audience interrupting to ask for one thing or another to be shown.

I'd love to share notes with anyone that's trying to do something substantially similar. The original intention was to build a DVD and VHS video library to share with other LUGs and offer as a starting point fo

OK, then how about an application to record what happens on screen? I am not familiar with such apps on Linux, but there must be some (I know there are a lot of them on Windows). This way you can have an AVI the minute after the presentation ends. This AVI can be just dropped onto the timeline in the video editing software and it would be piece of cake to intersperse it with the video of the presenter. A side advantage is that the quality of the recording would be much better this way (I was watching a lot

If the presenter exported his desktop using VNC, there are several ways to record. Stick a microphone in the middle of the room, and you've got the whole conversation along with what's on screen. Side benefit? All you need is a laptop with a mic built in, or just a mic and a decent computer.:)

Most people's text blogs are only of interest to a very few people, video blogs will be no different. However, as with text blogs, some video blogs will be of great interst. Some will be of news (Rodney King style), some will be from UN workers in Iraq, some will be from a future George Lucas. Portals and distributed reputation / recommendation services are what we need to help us find the things of interest to us.

Except that now, a few people will be wasting lots of bandwidth that could be used to, say, speed up my download of Firefox 1.0. 95% or more will probably be describing through video things that could just as easily be described through text. There exist several sites that use flash when they could use plain (or dynamic) HTML just as effectively - and with better cross-platform support. Basically, any boob can *already* link to a video from his text blog. Why does a new name have to be placed on somethi

The bandwidth that will be used by the exchange of commercial content (legitimate or pirated) will far, far exceed that of anything personal videoblogs could ever hope to achieve. There is not now and will not in the future be any effect in the price of bandwidth from personal videoblogs or people using flash instead of html on webpages.

It's cummulative. Lots of "just a little" adds up to a lot. Witness the affect of "feature creep" in software. Each feature contributes just a little slowdown, but lots of "features" gets you Windows XP.:)

BTW, in case you missed it, the price of bandwidth for consumers has gone down, largely driven by the increased multimedia content on the web. Flash is about the bigest non-porn reason people want bandwidth.

Hooray for the next big bandwidth waster! Everyone needs to stream not just text describing what I did today, and not just pictures, but full-friggin-motion video showing just what I may have done today!

This is about the fifth +5 insightful, funny troll post about what a waste video blogging is.

No bandwith is wasted when someone visits a site and downloads a video. They want to see it. Tons of bandwith is wasted every day by advertisers who movies into 80% of their visitor's browsers. Requested video i

The flash trash, moving gif polution in the average IE session. You know, top, left, right, bottom and mid article advertisements that take up about 80 of a person's browser. Maybe you don't know because you have a browser that blocks most of that or you have not installed flash. About 75% of the world uses M$ IE which has numerous exploits to make things even worse, such as porn advert hijacking. A large portion of the rest use a better browsers on

Demandmedia [demandmedia.net] is a collaborative video blog, based on the Scoop collaborative engine, users submit links to cool grass roots produced videos from around the 'net and users vote on which ones they like. Most of the video is of interest to those on the left end of the political spectrum.

The reason text blogging became so big is that it's easily searched and, thus, easily found via search engines.

Photos are becoming better catalogued, but anyone who has used Google's image search will tell you, we're still a long way off from something akin to "good."

Video will pose even bigger problems for search engines, meaning that most video clips that are posted will be ignored. Only those with something really valuable (political scandal, hot chicks, etc.) *AND* easily found will see any significant distribution and/or audience.

Meta, meta, meta. Sure goatse.cx is a prime example of meta data failing us, but for the most part, when you go to cnn.com, you get cnn.
If video gets cataloged correctly, and as technology improves to do more information extraction from it (video type, quality, length, etc... perhaps soon voice-to-text ala dragon or viavoice) I think you'll find that the archives of publically available video will start to resemble more or less a small portion of the private video archives that most TV networks have in th

Most video/photo blogs are of interest only to people who know the blog authors. The way you find interesting photos on such blogs is you get an email from the author saying, "Hey, look at my new pictures from my trip", visit the link, and scan for pictures that look interesting. With a layout that takes advantage of monitor width you can scan through a lot of thumbnails quickly. Or with properly shrunk JPEGs you can put them all on one page and scroll up and down. A similar thing could be done using st

One reason why blogging (or reading in general, for that matter) is popular, is that you can access the content at your own pace.

Watching a video requires the willingness and ability to follow the pace of the videomaker--which restricts audience. While you can skim through a bad writer's rantings and see very quickly if there is anything of value in a couple of pages of text, doing so on video is impractical.

Additionally, a good-paced video is actually hard to edit, and not something that most of us have been trained for in school, contrary to writing.

Their quality is now on par, I'd say, with the mid-80s regionally produced TV shows by the local affiliates of the big networks...
So, commercialism does drive quality, but the public abilities are never far behind.
But, yeah, public access. There's hope though... more people are video editing at home, and that spawns consumer products. Plus, your kids most likely have an option for video editing at school.
The public, moves slow, but I think will ultimately have the quality in the end.

I've seen some pretty remarkable community access stuff. Granted it came from NY or LA, but there's some good stuff out there... and I don't must mean "Justin's Filthy Friends" or Dr. Susan Block. [drsusanblock.com]

Collaborative editing and aggregation is just around the corner... like an RSS reader for video. It could be possible to do something like "show each first frame of all downloaded video, together at 30fps"... It could be a way to channel surf public video in an instant.

Text blogging is bad enough, where lots of people with nothing worthwhile to say about write about their boring life.

Photo blogging is worse, because those same boring people take picture of ugly and uninteresting places and people. To make things worse, most people don't get out enough to provide a reasonable variety in subject and have a total lack of photography skill resulting isn awful pictures.

Now comes video blogging, where those same people unable to get a life run around with a video camera to capture uninteresting ugly people in boring places making ineptly a fool out of themselves.

For all three categories, if any of those bloggers had any skill at writing, taking pictures or filming, they would be hired to do it for a living and not waste their time updating blogs.

The only blogs of interest contain good-looking naked women best presented by professionals to make it look like snapshots. But this is a different well-established industry.

You're not seeing the forest.
If you look at the flickr's tag feature, what you get are highly topical photos submitted by real people with very low error rate as to what they are about.
When the rawest of resources are combined, you can easily extract information from just about anything.
For instance, there's a USENET meme search engine somewhere out on the web that calculates the occurance of a word on USENET, and tallies the counts of posts.
For a popular term like "ColdPlay", you see peaks at their

Aas with dumpster diving, some people may get some unintended side benefits out of the junk published by others in blogs. But that doesn't give blogs of any form more meaning. As much as I'm not shopping to accommodate the dumpster divers, people aren't blogging for social profilers.

The only benefit of blogging is that it's harmless to others and doesn't pollute the enviromnent too much.

Besides the fact that the Internet Archive [archive.org] has promised unlimited bandwidth and storage for life for any Creative Commons [creativecommons.org] licensed material, it should be noted that BitTorrent is also playing a role in this.

By syndicating.torrents automatically, channels of swarming mirroring can be formed to amass what could be called efficient broadcasting. On private lans, there's also no reason why you couldn't run VLC and Myth, and have a complete video network with on-demand-downloadable-by-bt type content, as well as redistribution of streaming media already out on the net (remember the internet tv article?)

This is big, and it is hot. It's not *entirely* the downfall of big media, but it is in fact the eventuality of big media as our channel list grows, and our options for consumption and means of consuming this media grow.

Some claim that this means TV and Film will die, or that all this material will end up looking like the lamest of public-access tv....

Also, your kids are going to school and learning video production... on DV equipment in some cases.

So, it's not the end of big media... it's the start of a new decentralized wonder. It'll probably both be worse than today (ads that make Futurama's attempts at advertising parody not funny anymore), and much purer (how about a family, community, slashdot, or special interest group TV show? Commercial free?)

As a side note, some of these patterns will most likely be evident in tonight's Frontline on PBS about the "persuasion industry"... I'll be watching that one!

Anyway, start looking into this stuff, because it is what you make it. If you want to bitch about it, well, start your own damn TV show.

Considering that about 12-13 million people are regularly tuning in every week to see pointless pastiche like "Two and a Half Men" and "Survivor! VANUATU!!!" I'd say that lowest common denominator media has a long way to go before it's dead. Also, it's great that things like these will give voice to bright new talent, but that's the thing, it has to be bright new talent. Just because you've got an XL2 and a working knowledge of Premiere doesn't mean you're going to make anything I'd like to see.

Yet Another Wank-Fest . . . if videoblogging were a 'Revolution', we wouldn't need to be told about it on Slashdot. Put aside your delusions of grandeur and _do_something_ revolutionary if you want a revolution.

You don't think you could start your own revolution on *your* ideas with worldwide-distributed video? It's not grandeur, in fact, video images are becomming the tool of the common person. Hell, the last wedding I was at the slideshow had bluescreen, titling, montage fast editing... And it was done just by some guy.
The video revolution has been happening for some time, it's just getting closer to you.

I wanted to take a moment to plug a couple of things... The first is my personal moblog [nuxx.net] which really isn't anything special. However, the way the photos are published is kinda unique, and I thought other people might find it nice to play with.

What I use is the rather well-known PHP-based Gallery [menalto.com] photo management / presentation software, combined with an implementation of the Nokia Image Upload Server API [nokia.com] as a plugin [menalto.com] for Gallery.

It works great... I just snap a picture on the phone, go to the Gallery (on th

be Blogs with Bongos (AKA. Bwogs) or Blogs with Pianos or Blogs with Socks. C'mon, these articles are getting extremely boring. There has to be better "News for Nerds" out there than this, as this is certainly not "Stuff that matters".

Does it have to have mass appeal for it to be interesting? I think this technology facilitates the flow of things that *don't* have all that mass appeal.
Like a weekly show from true-techy women in a town talking about cool concerts coming up. That's it. I would watch that!

The *content* definitely doesn't have to have mass appeal to be interesting... if it had mass appeal, it would probably just become a TV show.

But the medium *does* need mass appeal (or at least some kind of critical mass) to become the 'next big thing'. The value of the medium has to outweigh the inconvenience, I think. I can read about cool concerts coming up in my town in a blog easier than I can download the video and watch it. And I can't see what extra value would come out of watching it instead of

Aha, I was lacking in vision... I hadn't really thought of the 'documentary' style of blogging, I was just thinking about people wanting to state their opinions & insights to the world, and I couldn't imagine why they would need to do that on video.

I stand corrected - the value of that content is definitely worth the bandwidth...

and iPodder will video blogging take off - if at all. I tried it using pMachine and a Nokia 3650 video phone and quickly realized; 1) I have a boring as s&^% life and 2) I'm one lazy Bas()*(^%.Check it out here: www.videoblog.tvNow there are a few new tools that will make the second problem less severe:1) Wirecast & VideoCue by Vara Software2) Live Channel by Channel Storm3) RSS 2.0 with enclosures.

I disagree with the post about audioblogs. I load 'em up using iPodderX and then have an huge library

I'm sure I'm summarising someone else's comments here but I can think of loads of reasons why this simply won't work/goes against blogging principles:
1) Expensive (broadband, camcorder, etc.)
2) It's slow
3) It's hardly something you can just dip into - you have to dedicate a certain amount of time to a video blog.
4) It's less of an impromtu note or comment, more of a staged medium.
Actually, I have this issue with all video- I really don't see why Joe Blog has much reason to record video- I'm (un)foruna

I run a portal site for video content, we've got a feed w/ enclosures. Check it out.

Thanks -- though I have been! The Daily Show's Bush words vs. facts video was fun.

From the Podcasting side, I can see the need for having transcripts. With text blogs, you can search them as-is. With audio or video blogs...there's little that is searchable. Anu idea if the video bloggers are considering this as an extra bit of data in the RSS feed?

Richer metadata is definitely an active topic in the community. Unfortunately, progress is slow as there's no agreement on how to represent a multimedia object and its potential related items (ie, different formats, different bitrates, a transcript, subtitles in another language, a shorter version, sign language representation, etc). Even if this problem is overcome, the difficulty in creating a transcript makes it not very likely that the searching problem will get better soon.

I'm not surprised. Making a manual transcript would be great...though I can't see it being done very often because it is so time consuming.

Are there any good speaker independant voice to text programs out there now? Even if there are, I can't see the poor quality of the current audio in most audio blogs being used to make useful transcripts.

Most MS users have to download the most crappy, worm-infested, memory-bloated, piece of shit software put out by any commecial company to listen and watch your stuff. And it keeps getting worse each year. So help put this sorry piece of crap protocol into the sesspool of history where it belongs and quit using RealAudio.

Increased production time. The Podcasters [slashdot.org] are finding that they are spending quite a bit of time figuring out what equipment to buy, how to use it, and what software to use. A 1 hour audio blog can take 3 hours to produce depending on how much polish is needed. Add video and I can see that tagging on another hour -- minimum -- unless you don't have much to show or don't care much about how it looks.

Who would want to look at ~your~ face?:)

That said, I think that video blogs will become popular...though it may be a couple years before these issues aren't as big of a problem to deal with.

[sarcasm]Yeah and then people could use tiny cameras that we will call "webcams" and then some people will even tell their lives on the web site and film themselves 24h on 24h. What an excellent original new idea!!![sarcasme/]

Anyone remember Ben Brown by chance? He was an early videoblogger with his Ben Brown show that went on for a number of episodes. (It seemed like a creative outlet for an unemployed techie.) It was pretty well known to the Metafilter/Fark crowd, at least.

He went away, but I have to say, that was a pretty good archetype for the video blogger. Just I think that video bloggers have even more of a problem in that they're not easily searchable, and one has to dedicate time to see the content more than pictures or text. It is far easier to turn people off than to turn them on because of the time a viewer needs to invest.

please. "push" technology is the next big thing. pretty soon you'll all be running thin clients, getting push content, and riding segways. and there will be xml, and set-top boxes, and portals, and aeron chairs, and it will all be written in java. just you wait!